Reliance Jio Less Than Thrilled At Airtel's Announcement Of 7,007 New Interconnection Points

Persisting disconnect.

A Reliance employee demonstrates Jio LYF phone at their headquarters on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, June 1, 2016. Picture taken June 1, 2016. REUTERS/Clara Ferreira Marques

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On Thursday, Airtel announced that it will be providing an additional 7,007 interconnection points to Reliance Jio. The company said that this will take up the number of total connection points provided to Jio to 17,000, which is capable of handling 75 million subscribers.

This announcement comes on the back of Airtel's meetings with TRAI chairman and the Communication Minister of India. Earlier TRAI had slammed a penalty of a total ₹3,050 crores on Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea for failing to provide sufficient connectivity points to Reliance Jio.

"We now request Jio to ensure that the additional POIs, that we have made available at a staggering pace, be operationalised with the same alacrity," Airtel said in a statement. "This will help identify any network related issues, which Jio may have in their network should any problems persist, given the massive over-capacities provided by us."

However, Reliance Jio welcomed the decision on an unhappy note, accusing Airtel of providing only one-way communication points.

"RJIL welcomes 7,007 additional POIs provided by Airtel consequent to the meetings of the Hon'ble Minister of Communication and TRAI Chairman with the CEOs of Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and RJIL earlier this week on the subject of the breach of QOS parameters. RJIL expects these E1s, for which intimation has been received today, to be operationalized by the teams of Airtel and RJIL in the coming days," the company said in a statement.

"It may be noted that there are no failures in on-net calls, while over 4.6 crore calls are still failing every day between Jio and Airtel. RJIL hopes that this situation will improve now that Airtel has consented to offer additional POIs. However, Airtel has continued to violate the Interconnection Agreement by offering one-way E1s as against both-way E1s as provided for in the Agreement, which would have resulted in much more efficient utilisation of interconnection resources, " the statement further read.